There are many old phrases that contain truth and wisdom practical to today.
"There are two sides to every story" is not one of those phrases.
That phrase is the bane of journalism and critical thinking. First, it's the standard starting line uttered by those who disagree. Second, it implies there are two - and only two - sides to issues. Most of the time there are three or more sides due to the complexity and variables of most issues.
The flip side is when there is only one side to the story.
Last week, the Citizen received a letter to the editor stating that antibiotics and vaccines are harmful. To publish such a letter would be harmful because not only is it false but it would help spread that falsehood and put many individuals with compromised immune systems at further risk. Despite what Jenny McCarthy and a discredited British researcher have to say, vaccines have saved millions of lives and not having them cost millions of lives before they were invented. There have been a tiny handful of individuals who have suffered side effects from vaccine injections but hardly enough to override the overall helpfulness of vaccines. Furthermore, vaccines are not loaded with toxic chemicals and they do not cause autism.
Period.
There's only one side to that story.
Holding a different side is to put one's personal beliefs over the health and welfare of many others.
Same goes for evolution.
Conservative MP James Lunney is free to quit the Tory caucus in defense of his personal beliefs on evolution but his personal beliefs are wrong. Charles Darwin missed a few things 150 years ago but that's because entire scientific branches, particularly genetics and biochemistry, didn't exist yet to help support his case. Evolution doesn't explain everything in the natural world but it has helped scientists ask the right questions and get the proper answers for more than a century and a half. Evolution has proven itself as reliable a theory as the theory that the sun will rise in the east in the morning and set in the west in the evening.
Climate change is not much different. While the Citizen publishes letters from people who insist it's not happening or admit it is but argue it doesn't matter because it's happened many times before, we do so reluctantly. Climate change is causing serious harm to the global ecosystem as we know it. There is only one side to that story. Where it gets complicated, however, is how serious the damage will be to the world over the next 10, 20, 50 and 100 years. Due to that uncertainty, we tolerate letters disputing climate change from time to time in this newspaper.
Tolerance has a limit, of course, even in a modern society far more tolerant of dissenting views than any time before. Denying the Holocaust or insisting that people of different races and genders are second-class citizens is intolerant and the holders of such views are rightfully scorned for being not just wrong but holding dangerous views.
Believing that vaccines hurt people and cause sickness is a dangerous view. Insisting that evolution isn't true is less dangerous but still harmful. Denying climate change and the damage it's causing is in the same camp.
Ironically, these challenges to modern scientific belief are themselves rooted in a modern belief. Only in recent times have the rights of the individual ascended to equal or eclipse that of the community. Up until very recently, someone standing up for their personal beliefs came at a far greater social cost, so most people kept those beliefs to themselves.
Individuality is wonderful but, like tolerance, it also has limits. There are many sides to that story and many views to take of where those limits start and end. Some stories, however, evolve into truths. Vaccines work, evolution is real and so is climate change. How uncomfortable those truths are for certain individuals doesn't mean there is another side to the story.
